Sarah
Smithson,
MD, MPH
Assistant Dean for Clinical Education
University of North Carolina School of Medicine
Sarah Smithson is the Assistant Dean for Clinical Education at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine and the Director of Relational Leadership @Carolina. Her areas of interest include curricular innovation in health systems, communication, and team-based care delivery. She is an Assistant Professor in the Division of General Medicine and Clinical Epidemiology where she practices outpatient primary care in Internal Medicine. Sarah earned degrees in medicine and public health from Emory University. She completed residency in Internal Medicine at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Presenting at the Nexus Summit:
Improving the quality of care performed by interprofessional teams has been a complex problem in health care for years. Progress has been made with the adoption of formal quality improvement measures; however, success has been slower and more variable than anticipated. Research shows that relational issues, not technical problems, are more often impairing the success of quality improvement initiatives (1). In fact, improvement efforts often overemphasize technical approaches, to the detriment of relational ones, when evidence supports that relational factors are more impactful on…